One of My Biggest Regrets

One of the biggest regrets of my life is selling off all my Sega Genesis games. In the early 90s, I got my hands on something called a game copier and copied all of my games before selling them at liquidation prices. At the time I thought I was so smart, but looking back I see that I was nothing but greedy and short-sighted. The Genesis was one of my favorite consoles, and what I was doing was deleting mementos of my childhood one game at a time. Not only that, I was doing something illegal, pirating games, and I was doing it all for a measly $10 per game. Fortunately, I never had access to a Master System game copier, or else I probably would have sold off that collection, too.

When I look back at how I acquired all of those games in the first place, I wonder how I could have been so stupid to sell them. I was excited to buy each and every one and played all of them extensively. It was a time when I would really value a single game because it was all I had. Reading the manual, plugging the physical cartridge into the console, admiring the box art, none of these things can be done with a game copier. Why didn’t I think of it then?!

The saddest thing is that these childhood mementos will never, ever come back. This is what I regret the most. As I’ve written on this blog, I’ve recently gone through and disposed of some old things, but there are some items in my life that are off limits that I will never dispose of. My Sega Genesis games should have been one of those items.

To find some solace I’m going to try to “rebuild” my collection using screenshots of title screens. I’ll try to reconstruct my collection in order of acquisition. When I’m done it should be pretty cool to look at a grid of title screens. It would have been better to have the actual games, of course, but unfortunately some mistakes can never be rectified.